Showing results for "Nazi Science" in History

When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz, of Dachau; and when they think of justice for this terrible chapter in history, they think of Nuremberg. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war-crimes trial against the Nazis was in this idyllic, peaceful Ukrainian city, which is fitting, because it is also where the Holocaust actually began.

Argentina, 1960. A car speeds through the streets of Buenos Aires. Inside are four Israeli secret agents and their prisoner: Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious war criminals of Nazi Germany. In this detailed memoir, Rafi Eitan tells the story of his remarkable life and career. He describes how as a teenager, he smuggled Jewish refugees into Palestine, and how, as a spy in the newly established Mossad, he swam through sewers to blow up a British radar station. He goes on to describe in detail his involvement in the extraordinary hunt for the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

As Russian forces closed in on Berlin and Hitler’s premiership drew to a close, many Nazi officials fled Germany. In this startling, meticulously researched account, acclaimed journalist Uki Goñi unravels the complex network that led them to Argentina. Relying on international support—in Scandinavia, Switzerland, and Italy—and the enthusiasm of the Vatican and President Juan Perón, Goñi shows how this ratline allowed Adolf Eichmann—the architect of the Final Solution—Josef Mengele, Eric Priebke, and many more, into the country.

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in Eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history.

As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were soon caught, including the notorious SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among them were Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who performed hideous medical experiments at Auschwitz; Martin Bormann, Hitler’s brutal personal secretary; Klaus Barbie, the cruel "Butcher of Lyon"; and perhaps the most awful Nazi of all: Adolf Eichmann.

At the end of World War II, U.S. intelligence agents confiscated thousands of Nazi documents on what was known as the “Fischer-Tropsch Process” - a series of equations developed by German chemists unlocking the secrets of how oil is formed. When the Nazis took power, Germany had resolved to develop enough synthetic oil to wage war successfully, even without abundant national oil reserves.

Summer, 1945. The war is over, and Germany has surrendered. Across Europe, the top surviving Nazis are being tracked down, arrested and imprisoned in a once-opulent Luxembourg hotel, on 24-hour suicide watch. Now, the Allies must decide what to do with them. After much deliberation, Britain, America, Russia and France agree that Hitler's high command must be formally tried. This will be an entirely new kind of trial, with utterly new charges: those of 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide'. And before it can even take place, numerous crises and obstacles must be overcome.

More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War, the era of the Nazi hunters is drawing to a close as they and the hunted die off. Their saga can now be told almost in its entirety. After the Nuremberg trials and the start of the Cold War, most of the victors in World War II lost interest in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Many of the lower-ranking perpetrators quickly blended in with the millions who were seeking to rebuild their lives in a new Europe, while those who felt most at risk fled the continent.

From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini's influence on his German ally. Goeschel, a scholar of 20th-century Germany and Italy, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler's key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public.

Famed historian, university professor, and author of the groundbreaking "The Case for Colonialism" Bruce Gilley demonstrates that, contrary to modern presuppositions, German colonialism from its early roots to the mid-twentieth century served overall as a global force for good in the world, elevating the lives of its subjects and encouraging scientific development while allowing native cultures to flourish within its governance.

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

Now a green open space enjoyed by residents, Fort Hunt, Virginia, about 15 miles south of Washington, DC, was the site of one of the highest-level, clandestine operations during World War II.

On January 13, 1940, FBI agents burst into the homes and offices of seventeen members of the Christian Front, seizing guns, ammunition, and homemade bombs. J. Edgar Hoover's charges were incendiary: the group, he alleged, was planning to incite a revolution and install a "temporary dictatorship" in order to stamp out Jewish and Communist influence in the United States. In Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher provides a crucial missing chapter in the history of the American far right.

In 1939 Rev. Waitstill Sharp, a young Unitarian minister, and his wife, Martha, a social worker, accepted a mission from the American Unitarian Association: They were to leave their home and young children in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to help address the mounting refugee crisis. Armed with only $40,000, the Sharps quickly learned the art of spy craft and covertly sheltered political dissidents and Jews and helped them escape the Nazis.

In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street - and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there - was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story - from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.

In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.

Martin Gilbert presents a comprehensive look into the series of decisions that helped shape this particular course of the war, and the fate of millions of people, through his eminent blend of exhaustive devotion to the facts and accessible, graceful writing. Through firsthand accounts by escaped Auschwitz prisoners, Gilbert reconstructs the span of time between Allied awareness and definitive action in the face of overwhelming evidence of Nazi atrocities.

What would life be like for a Black boy growing up in Nazi Germany? This unprecedented autobiography answers that question with the spellbinding true story of Hans J. Massaquoi’s life in Hamburg during the height of Hitler’s regime. Hans is the son of a Black Liberian diplomat father and a white German mother. His father returns to Africa at the beginning of the war, leaving them behind in poverty without the means to flee. Within this tense atmosphere, increasingly violent Nazi policies and Allied bombing raids make Hans and his mother’s lives a day-to-day survival struggle.

In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its overseas colonies. This sudden transition to a post-colonial nation left the men and women invested in German imperialism to rebuild their status on the international stage. Remnants of an earlier era, these Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans) exploited any opportunities they could to recover, renovate, and market their understandings of German and European colonial aims in order to reestablish themselves as "experts" and "fellow civilizers" in discourses on nationalism and imperialism.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.